The Spirits: Just don’t call this whiskey a bourbon

Last week, three whiskey men from Tennessee were in Hawksmoor, Covent Garden, trying to come to terms with the black pudding they had been served that morning.

“You know, if I didn’t know what was in it, I’d love it,” drawled Mark, who wore a baseball cap and a Deliverance-style beard. “What is it, like chitterlings?” said Phil, who had a slight air of Morgan Freeman.

Randy — a rambunctious distiller, known to all as “Goose” — looked as if he would eat anything. But there were some things that even a 300lb Southerner would not touch. “Pig’s blood? That’s about the limit,” he said.

The three colleagues were in London to build a 26ft-high Christmas tree out of Jack Daniel’s barrels in Covent Garden. Promotional duties. According to the adverts on our chilly Tube platforms, they do this once a year in the town square of Lynchburg, Tennessee, where their distillery is based.

I hoped to discover whether life in that town was as much of a cliché as it appeared on those adverts — but Goose made a semi-comprehensible baseball analogy when I asked directly. I tried instead to find out what they all did when they were not making whiskey.

“I personally drive my Harley,” offered Mark. “I like to take off and just disappear, get lost. Don’t take no map — nothing. How about you Phil?”

“Oh, I’m a certified barbecue judge,” said Phil. Couldn’t make it up really.

Jack Daniel’s is by far the best-selling American whiskey, which is among the fastest growing spirit categories in the UK. It is not bourbon as commonly supposed — “now don’t use the b-word!” — but a Tennessee whiskey. Like bourbon, this is distilled mainly from corn, with each batch aged in a newly charred oak barrel, which caramelises the sugars. Tennessee whiskey is then run through an additional maple charcoal filter. This makes it more approachable than a scotch, say, and well-suited to mixing up in Manhattans and Old Fashioneds. “Though mostly we like to drink it straight,” as Mark pointed out.

Goose poured out a new batch. Phil — a taster for the past 25 years — ran the glass under his nose, swirling it to release the aromas. “You want to roll it around a little bit, take a good deep breath, and if it smells good and sweet like this does, it’s a good batch,” he said.

“He’s still trying to figure out how to spit it back out,” japed Goose.

As we laughed and drank, two things jarred. The first is that despite all the “family” talk, Jack Daniel’s operates on an industrial scale - it moved more than 10 million cases last year. The second is that it is made in a place where alcohol is illegal.

“Tennessee went dry in 1909,” explained Goose. “So you know, they moved the distillery to Alabama but then Alabama went dry. They moved to Missouri — but Missouri went dry. Then Prohibition came into effect all over the US in 1919. During Prohibition, our state senators in Nashville passed a bill saying you’d have to have 2,500 voters inside the city limits to revoke it.”

Since Lynchburg has a population of 361, that has never been possible. They are allowed to make the whiskey there, “but we ain’t got no bars, no liquor stores. You got a go out the county to buy it.”

Strange place, the American South. Presumably you can still fire guns?